


Receptive

by darkwood



Series: Quite a Pair [2]
Category: Being Human, Being Human (UK)
Genre: F/M, background George/Nina
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-17
Updated: 2012-12-23
Packaged: 2017-11-21 09:59:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,243
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/596411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkwood/pseuds/darkwood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was an old argument. It was his old argument. He prefers it this way. This is good, isn’t it? Just being together is so much more than he hoped for. And it doesn’t matter, anyway, because she can’t. And he hates disappointing her, he can’t do that to her. He doesn’t want that to come between them when there’s so much that they are without it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Not end of season 3 compliant. Basically take a walk somewhere in the middle of season 3, and we’ll end up somewhere like here.

 

         It was an old argument. It was _his_ old argument, one that he had aloud with himself periodically to reinforce the agreement that he’d made for both of them. He prefers it this way. This is good, isn’t it? Just being together is so much more than he hoped for. So much more than he deserved, and really it’s better like this because sex for him has been violence for so long that he doesn’t know how to do it any other way. And it doesn’t matter, anyway, because she can’t. And he hates disappointing her, he can’t do that to her. He doesn’t want that to come between them when there’s so much that they _are_ without it.

         A lovely pattern of logic set out by the one who feels guilty for still existing, no matter what else he’s done. An argument he repeats enough that it’s like an echo traveling through time with them. One he has to repeat because he still reaches for her _that way_. From time to time his embrace lingers on her, or his hand slides along her more slowly. She knows the difference in his touch.

         She can _feel_ it.

         But it’s over so quickly. He aborts whatever action so quickly, pulling away from that touch he’s trying to give her and starts his argument that she can’t say anything back. All those years of him – one-seventeen gone and then one-twenty-five, later it would be one-fifty and one-ninety-eight – a strange legacy of stubbornness he thinks is knowledge that she can’t seem to argue with. Mitchell hangs onto his logic like he hangs onto his abstinence. He’s not ready to hear what she has to say and she is the one at fault just as much as he is because _he had to wait_.

         She’d died. She’d been _murdered_ , but that was sorted. Six months later it had still _hurt_ but not the way she thought it would. Anger burned the pain out of her, and the cold emptiness of the other side washed away even the flames. And Mitchell was there. Not waiting with open arms for her, but present and grounding.

         Mitchell wasn’t so lucky. He’d been there, been _somewhere_ and… nothing. There wasn’t the right someone to make him feel ok, because she wasn’t anywhere. He’d had to wait for her to be.

         At first it seemed like a simple thing because Annie never believed in predestination before she died. Well, not beyond the general sentiment of “things will turn out”, anyway. Or that girlish “true love” sentiment that had always made her forgive Owen for being… Owen. Then she’d crossed over to this side. Now… well. Mitchell and all his stubborn insistence didn’t believe in that sort of thing, so maybe it wasn’t. They fell in love, they weren’t forced into it by anything. Encouraged, maybe, but it was simple. It was grand, really. And when she looked at Mitchell she felt so much and so strongly that then it wasn’t simple, because what if fate and destiny and all that weren’t something you had to believe in for them to be real?

         Before it happened, before she died, she never believed in ghosts. But they were real. _She was real_. Real because of Mitchell and George and Nina. Real because Mitchell had seen her in that window so many years ago.

         Sometimes he still looked at her like he had that day he caught sight of her in the window. It lightened his bow and eased the creases beside his eyes. It was a look of wonder. Mitchell looked at her like she was the only thing left. Like he’d had too many tomorrows and too much forever and he’d been putting off acknowledging how much immortality stole from you and he wasn’t strong enough to do it alone.

         She’d tried to ask him more than once about when she’d been taken. George had filled in what he knew but there were gaps that even Mitchell’s confession didn’t explain. That doctor had lived, the priest had lived long enough to be a threat again, and when he slept, Mitchell turned in whatever direction she moved in. Almost like he was keeping track of her, like he could sense her.

         And Annie always knew where he was. Like that mother with her baby all those years ago, when she shifted positions she could be _at_ Mitchell like he was a place. And that was strange, wasn’t it? A being couldn’t be home. A person couldn’t be a landmark.

         That sort of thing wasn’t normal, from what she could tell, even among the abnormals.

         It didn’t matter if it was strange, though, because it was true. It was real, and even though that real thing was strange, it was almost tangible. And tangible was good.

         The little things made it seem right between them, but they also made it seem important. There was weight to the connection, almost like their souls were knitted together, somehow.

         She thought about that on the late nights when he passed out beside her, stinking of whiskey and cigarettes that she couldn’t smell. Annie felt calm beside him, and warm in a way that she never did anywhere else. She was needed, but more, she was loved.

         It felt like… the only thing she could liken it to was that Mitchell was her soul mate. The love she’d found him in death was the true one, and it had only taken six months.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

         Mitchell was over a hundred.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

         Mitchell had been _this_ for over a hundred years.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

         That thought plagued her when she thought things like _soul mate_ and savored how quickly she’d found him.

         It made her feel a little guilty.

         So she could let him make his argument for both of them. They had eternity, after all, and he deserved to have with her all the time she’d taken just to _be_.


	2. The Talk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some things can't be left unsaid. Not anymore.

         There was a conversation that they had at the beginning. Annie had aborted it at first, brushed it off. Mitchell was Mitchell, and there was nothing that she didn’t already know about him, right? There wasn’t anything to worry about. It was just Mitchell. Nina was just imagining reasons to worry.

         And then there was that terrible night when her bright idea almost went terribly, horribly wrong.

         She should have known better. It was beyond even their abnormal bounds, getting him a bit drunk and having him bring someone else home had certainly seemed like a good idea when she was desperate for a physical connection so she could be a ‘proper’ girlfriend to Mitchell.

         Whatever sort of proper one could be to a vampire, coaxing Mitchell off his wagon wasn’t it.

         But his reaction had been so big it was obvious there was more. And his reaction to her afterwards was off. So one evening when they retreated from George and Nina’s cooing at one another over the upcoming baby, Annie had asked.

 

*

 

         Mitchell couldn’t express to Annie how much he loved just laying with her. It wouldn’t make sense, out loud, to anyone but him. Even his beautiful, darling Annie would think he was mental. She was dead, they were similar, but her dead and his dead were a bit different.

         He stroked her back, letting his eyes close. He could almost _feel_ the texture of her sweater if he tried. He wasn’t sure if it was real or not, but it was a wonderful thing to focus on instead of what he knew George and Nina were up to.

         Annie was still against him, and that was a flag. She was never still unless she was thinking about something.

         Well. If she didn’t want to talk about it, he wasn’t going to force her. She’d ask or say eventually, and that was good enough. Especially if she stayed with him like this while she did her thinking through it.

         “You had something you wanted to tell me… before,” she said. Her voice not only took the quiet out of the room, her words stabbed him in the back.

         He thought the memories were bad. His victims’ eyes staring silently back at him, angrily judging him and telling him that it wasn’t enough. It was ambiguous, ‘it’ covered anything he was doing or tried to do. Lately he imagined those hate-filled eyes chanting that he didn’t deserve ‘this’. ‘This’ was just as bad. ‘This’ meant George and Annie as friends, meant Annie’s love and affection. ‘This’ meant everything he’d gotten recently.

         They were in his mind, and in his mind they were right, so when he thought about it he knew he was damned.

         Panic rose in him, and his whole body tensed. He didn’t mean to arch up, but he did, almost like he’d been staked. Annie tightened her arms around him, seeming defiant about being dislodged from her comfortable place against his chest.

         “Y-yeah,” Mitchell acknowledged, turning his head from her and playing off his motion as stiffness by shifting further into the mattess.

         “I already told you that I love you, and it doesn’t matter,” Annie said. She leaned up a little. One of her hands rubbed his chest. She was innocent, she was being innocent and attempting to comfort him, but he was so worried that he felt the stake in his chest again.

         “Then why are you asking?”

         “Do you suddenly not want to tell me?”

         “Annie-” he started.

         “I’m new at this,” Annie admitted. “I’ve never known a vampire before, much less, you know, _known_ one.”

         “About yesterday, I told y-” he tried

         “I know you did. And I understand. But that wasn’t what you wanted to tell me before.”

         “No,” he acknowledged.

         “So tell me.”

         “Annie…”

         She sat up fully, one hand still against his chest as though she could hold him there with it. Her sweater was falling off one shoulder and she sighed. “Look, I thought about it. You’ve never tried to tell me something like that before, and… and…”

         It looked like she was struggling with it. He reached up for her forearm, and she let him have it, but when he tugged gently she refused to come back down to the bed. He sighed. “And?”

         “You need to tell me what it is. Because maybe if you’d told us what was going on last time you wouldn’t have ended up… you were missing, and then it all went to hell, Mitchell. _I went to hell_.”

         He closed his eyes. His mouth felt dry, and he wished he’d had that woman the night before. For a moment he wished he’d taken her blood and washed the conscience out of himself.

         But then he wouldn’t have Annie.

         That was a cold, ugly thought. He opened his eyes. Annie was leaning over him, closer than before. “Promise me…” he started, and stopped himself. He didn’t want that promise. He didn’t want her to promise to forgive him, because what he’d done wasn’t her responsibility to forgive. He took a breath.

         “Promise you… what?”

         “Don’t leave me,” Mitchell said. He felt wretched. The words weren’t even spoken and he felt like Annie was slipping away.

         “This does sound serious,” Annie said. She sat up, tugging at his arm to get him to sit up as well.

         “… I’d rather not… not tell you here,” Mitchell said. He tilted his head, listening. The noise of the house was-

         “George and Nina are in their room,” Annie said.

         “Right, I just-”

         “Let’s go downstairs and I’ll make you some tea.”

         Mitchell nodded, but he didn’t feel the smile he spread across his lips for her. Tea wouldn’t fix this problem. It wasn’t going to go away on the far side of biscuits and her perfect cup of tea.

         But he could let her think that for a while.

         He wanted her to think that.

         He wanted it to be true.

         He was desperately afraid that because it wasn’t he was going to be minus one Annie once his story was over.

 

*

 

         It was the sort of conversation that made her cry. It was the sort of conversation where he retracted into himself and stared at the mug in his hands. He clung to that, the way she was pretty sure he wanted to cling to her.

         Annie couldn’t speak to him for days after. Nina and George were both confused. Annie assured them it was just ‘their stuff’, and George was easily convinced to let them take care of it on their own. He was preoccupied with the coming baby. Nina seemed more skeptical, but she was also more pregnant, and wary of everything.

         When Annie finally did… when she could bring herself to look at him without seeing the things he’d done, she was glad he’d come up with his reason they shouldn’t get physical. If they had somehow managed to… she’d be gone. She’d have turned on him, and she loved him.

 

*

 

         Mitchell was alone, smoking out back by the kitchen door. He knew why he did it. George and Annie complained at him about it, said it was bad for him. He knew that it was better than the alternative. He needed some sort of outlet, and cigarettes and booze was better than blood.

         George and Nina were out for the night. Some sort of a date that involved secret destinations and all the sweetness that George could be when he was allowed to.

         Mitchell was avoiding Annie because he was scared that the next words she’d say to him would be some variant of ‘it’s over’ that would rip his heart out of his chest. He’d been waiting for the other shoe to drop for days. Annie was never this silent to him. She never didn’t smile. Even when she had been angry there was a hint of amusement to it, as though he was not really in trouble.

         Even without looking he knew she was outside with him. His chest tightened and his stomach tensed a little. Annie had, apparently, decided it was time.

         He welcomed it, in a way. He’d rather have it done with, if she was done with it. This had been a wall of silence. It was torture. She barely looked at him, she didn’t say much more than a quiet ‘morning’, and though there were cups and cups of tea, none seemed to be his.

         He kept his eyes on the ground, but he could feel her coming closer before her gray booted feet came into view.

         “Look at me,” Annie said.

         Mitchell did, ready for the pain she would give him, ready to banish himself and leave George to Nina and Annie. Because he would do that, if Annie wasn’t willing to have him. This wasn’t like Josie, it wasn’t like the ones before her. This was serious, it was real. If there wasn’t an Annie, then there would be no one.

         Her face was calm. He could pick out her expression easily in the dark. She was displeased.        

         “Don’t you have anything to say?”

         “I already told you.”

         She pressed her lips together. She seemed to be mulling something over. Her eyebrows tensed. He watched the changes in her expression raptly, memorizing them in case they were the last he ever saw of them.

         “There are more stories like that one.”

         “Not with quite so many people at once… for the most part.”

         She sucked in a breath.

         He waited.

         “And the other night, with that woman?”

         “If you hadn’t stopped me…”

         “Well I also _started_ you on that one,” she said with a shake of her head. Her curls bounced against her cheeks as she did it, and he watched them and loved how alive she seemed even if she was angry and disappointed and probably going to leave him.

         “That was me, Annie. It wasn’t you.”

         “Funny, it doesn’t feel like that.”

         “You shouldn’t feel guilty,” Mitchell repeated. He tucked his free arm tight across his chest, taking a long drag of his cigarette. “It’s not you. You’re- It’s me.”

         “Are you breaking up with me?” Annie asked, cocking her head.

         “No!” Shouting it made the cigarette fall from his lips, and he fumbled to rescue it.

         “Because _that_ was a breakup line.”

         “Jesus. No. It’s not a breakup- ok, maybe it is, sometimes. But it’s also the truth, in this case. No, Annie, I’m not breaking up with you. If you… well. You could do, if you wanted. I wouldn’t stop you.”

         She frowned. “That’s either very noble or- no. Sorry, not noble. It’s crap, Mitchell. You came for me because you ‘missed me’, you start this… this… _thing_ and then you say you wouldn’t stop me if I tried to leave you?”

         It was Mitchell’s turn to frown. “I know what I am, Annie. You didn’t. I could understand if you had… buyer’s remorse.”

         “This is where you equate yourself to a fatty dessert, then? Or are you the health teacher trying to tell me that dessert can’t love me back? Does my éclair not really love me?”

         “ _Of course_ I love you, I-”

         She was close, and he almost hadn’t realized it. Her hands closed around the wrist he had under his arm and guided it out. She stepped in close, pushing into his personal space, and he almost flinched at how she looked him in the eye. “I’m never going to be ok with what you did.”

         He was holding a breath he didn’t need.

         “And?” he asked gently when she didn’t say anything.

         “And you’re going to _have_ to talk to me. Otherwise it will happen again, and that’ll be it. I could love you forever, but not if you start filling a cemetery in your spare time.”

         Mitchell sighed, inching his arm around her. “D’you mean that?”

         “It doesn’t forgive it,” Annie said. She leaned into him, and he flicked the cigarette away to put both arms around her. “But I knew you were a monster. I just… had to figure it out.”

         “Well, let’s hope that’s the last of it,” Mitchell said. He put his face into her neck. She stroked his back and he sagged against her.

         “We’ll have to figure something out,” Annie said softly. “You can’t… George said it’s all the time for you. If it gets bad, we have to… to know what to do.”

         He soothed her, rocking her gently. He’d hurt _her_ this time, he could hear it in her voice, but more than that he could _feel_ it.

         “I need you,” he said against her ear. “For this I… just need you.”


	3. What He Could Make Her Feel

         Mitchell seemed desperate to be in control. He projected an air of sagacity around people that made them think he was older and more knowing than he really was. Annie could see through it. She’d seen the panicked moments when he shouted for quiet and tried to think his way through things in a way that an older soul would react to without the panic. And there _were_ bad things they’d seen, but she didn’t have his problem with choosing because she wasn’t worried about what he was worried about. He was worried he’d destroy one of them, and knew that would destroy them both. He was worried about losing himself and losing _her_ to his darkness. She had known even before he’d admitted he needed her to fight the darkness in him, though now that she knew, she just felt more strongly.

         Annie knew they’d survive it, whatever _it_ was, because she’d decided it. She loved Mitchell, and **nothing** was going to change that or take him away from her. Eternity, he’d pointed out, was theirs.

         He was more scared of things. He was scared of himself, what he might do… what the others might do to him or her. Sometimes the tumult of all that made him brittle.

         So instead of pushing about their little… argument, Annie upheld their arrangement, and she held on to what he could make her feel.

         At first it was just the taste of things, but then as the years stretched on and George started complaining of gray hairs, it got better. It got to be more that she _could feel_ when she tasted and smelled and felt through him.

         Sometimes when he was smoking, she tipped her temple against his cheek and felt the way a cigarette tasted to him. She’d tried to smoke once, what felt like a hundred years ago, and all she remembered was burning and coughing. On Mitchell, _through_ Mitchell the experience was different. There was no thick feeling of the smoke, it was fluid. He experienced a cigarette like how she remembered a kiss. It was warm and moist and dry all at the same time.

         Other times she tasted the whiskey he drank. She’d lean against his back, let her arms slide around his neck, and it was similar to a cigarette, just without the dryness. Warm and liquid and smooth. Whiskey slid along his tongue and down his throat like a gentle hand stroking his skin and _oh_ if only whiskey was really like that. Her only taste of whiskey had been terrible. She’d just turned twenty-one, and got so drunk that she’d thrown up in the pub and gotten them thrown out of it. She couldn’t _remember_ the whiskey or the vomiting, but every time she smelled it she had to fight to keep from gagging. Through Mitchell it was so much better. There was no gagging. She tightened her arms around his neck and welcomed it like he was giving her an embrace.

         Annie could live in those sensations because when she felt through him, there was more. She never tried to read Mitchell’s aura. After what Sykes had said about privacy, she didn’t think it would be polite. And there were things about him that she knew but was still learning to accept.

         His admission had sobered her about what he might do, what she now knew he had done in the past, but it couldn’t dampen the strength of her feelings for Mitchell. Her feelings were so strong, and she wanted _so much…_

         But no. It wasn’t right. They weren’t ready. Mitchell couldn’t contain himself and Annie worried that if he lost control with her he’d break. They were still working out that arrangement that they needed.

         What was helping her along was the affection he always projected at her. She could feel it like a glow, without even reaching for him.

         Love was her favorite sensation, and Mitchell always had that on him.


	4. The Arrangement

         It wasn’t a perfect system.

         Mitchell wasn’t _always_ willing to be touched. It was impossible. No one could want that all the time. Anyway Annie didn’t want to touch him all the time, so she didn’t.

         But even when she wasn’t touching Mitchell, Annie could still feel him. Almost like she could still feel, dimly, the walls of the house she’d died in, and Honolulu Heights afterwards. He was like a fixed point. Mitchell was still.

         Oh he moved a lot, but his body didn’t have the same pulse as living things. He was static, a lot like she was. But the heart that didn’t beat any more was so much more alive than anything else around him. It was like a beacon, and sometimes she wondered if George hadn’t heard it too.

         They both had jobs – really Mitchell had a job, and once she was consistently solid enough again Annie did part-time work because she refused to be a supernatural lay about – but it was just to pitch in on the rent of the place. George constantly insisted that it wasn’t necessary, but Nina never held back on her opinion.

         Honolulu Heights was not a proper place to raise a baby. They all knew it, but Nina was the one who came out and said it. They needed someplace else, someplace with a yard and a school and all the things that normal children needed. They did not need rotting walls and couches that still sometimes smelled like unwashed visitors and a broken upstairs window.

         It also, Mitchell suggested softly during the house meeting, needed to be close enough to the greater outdoors that they weren’t commuting for the monthly night of solitude.

         And nobody really liked Wales.

         The problem was, relocating was different with four of them. Three that would take work to move, but still three with one coming was much more difficult to house shop for than two. Mitchell was daunted by the task, Nina was pregnant, and though George had a lot of good intentions it was just _easier_ on all of them to stay there.

         Annie might have agreed with Nina, but she was just starting to like Honolulu Heights. She liked surfing on the non-existent waves in the downstairs. She liked that the place creaked just a little when she walked down the halls. She liked that there were enough rooms far enough away from each other that she didn’t have to hear absolutely everything that George and Nina were up to when they were on their own.

         And this was where Mitchell had brought her when she was saved. This was where they’d really _found_ each other.

         She knew it was silly and sentimental, and she didn’t say a word to Mitchell about it, but she didn’t encourage the boys to find somewhere new, and helped make it much more up to standards for Nina as the baby’s arrival came.

         Mitchell haunted the halls as much as she did as they all waited for the baby. He seemed tense, but when Annie sat him down for a talk – the first of many, she knew – he was really fine. Just restless, he said, with all the anticipation brewing about.

         Annie let him have that. They hadn’t spontaneously merged. Whatever it was that they were to each other – lovers, best friends, true love, soul mates – they were still separate people. They did things separately. They were a pair of observers in and out of crowds and enjoying the scenery.

         Annie liked to spend a bit of time out among people, being unseen among them. She knew that Mitchell followed her. He did it a lot at first, when the paranoia was strong in him. He called it that, but she knew from George and all the things that Mitchell did that it was really the fear. It flared up every so often, usually when someone he knew turned up dead or gone.

         Mitchell liked to take walks. The afternoon, he said, was his safe time.

         When he was out on a walk, she would know what he was moving through if she concentrated on him. If the wind had picked up or if there was someone nearby that smelled edible to him. A rush of desire would pulse through him, and it would send him hurrying back to the house. Sometimes he came in without words, and sometimes he called out to her.

*

         Annie felt Mitchell, just as always, only louder. The house was empty. George and Nina were taking baby Eve out visit George’s parents, and they were gone for a few days. Annie hadn’t been keen on it, unsure how safe it was for them to be gone for so long, but George wanted to and Nina insisted that they go. Mitchell had gone out for a walk just after lunch, saying he’d be back before dinner.

         She had expected another normal night. She and Mitchell were sharing cooking lessons. She didn’t know what he liked to eat, and he didn’t know what all she could cook, and it was something they could fumble through together.

         Her expectations of a quiet evening were shattered when she felt a stab of panic. She dropped the tea she’d been making onto the kitchen floor and tried, for a moment, to _find Mitchell_. But he was moving, fast, and she couldn’t do it.

         It wasn’t long before she felt where he was headed. Mitchell was coming to the house and it was like he was a tank rattling the road as he hurried down it. There were echoes and loud noises like he was stomping on the sidewalk hard enough to break the stone.

         The door was barely shut before he shouted out her name.

         “Annie!” Mitchell screamed, and the tortured sound seemed ripped from his throat.

         It felt like she was being _pulled_. Not the way she’d been dragged, but her heart cried out and she knew where it was coming from. He called, and she was there. Usually when she moved herself to him, she came back near him. Most recently it was near enough to hold his hand if she had reached out for it. But something about _that_ scream and on instinct she came into the room across from the door, facing him but with her back to the wall.

         Mitchell staggered a step, reaching blindly behind him for the latch. His eyes were full black and he clamped a hand over his mouth, hiding his fangs. His chest heaved. He was breathing hard. His hair hung limply around his face and his color was bad.

         Annie wasn’t sure she’d noticed before that his skin color could get to such pallor. If either of them were human, she might say he looked as white as a sheet. (Thankfully those jokes had died off long ago, they tended to trigger a lack of humor in her.)

         The room was quiet. His shout had drowned out every other noise from the place. Then the sound of Mitchell’s breathing filled the space, and it was loud. His eyes were closed tightly and his chest was heaving.

         She knew this Mitchell even though she’d only met him once.

         This Mitchell had black eyes and he took things. He drank blood. Years ago now he was the one who had advanced upon her, frightened her. He was the one that scared her from what she felt for the other Mitchell, for _her_ Mitchell. The Mitchell staring at her through her Mitchell’s face desired her in the worst way. It rolled off him like a stench, stronger than anything she usually felt.

         But still, beneath it was affection. She could never be afraid of Mitchell. Not when he still had that radiating affection about him.

         She had to be strong for him. She _had to_.

         “Is your face gone all pale because all your blood rushed somewhere else?” Annie asked, keeping where she was with just enough distance between her and the wall that she wasn’t pressed against it really. She straightened her spine as she spoke and folded her arms. She was a ghost, and the only way he could hurt her would be to break her heart.

         His eyes snapped open – almost his eyes again, wild but not the all-black of a vampire – and he stared at her. He didn’t move forward, just stared. His hand came away from his mouth, fangs gone.

         It took minutes that stretched into half an hour and then an hour, and Annie was glad she couldn’t get stiff or have a leg fall to sleep, but the half-her-Mitchell, half-other-Mitchell stared at her and he calmed down.

         Finally he closed his eyes again, tipping his head back, and took a deep breath. When he opened his eyes he was _her_ Mitchell again. “Annie I-” he started, but she interrupted by throwing herself into his arms.

         She could feel every inch of him against her, but she didn’t say it. She could feel the erection trapped between them, and the tensing of his muscles. He hesitated before putting his arms around her, but once they were, he latched onto her with a grip like a vice. His whole body was shaking and there was sweat on his brow.

         They stood there, again, for a long time. Sometimes he tried to say something, but she hushed him. Mitchell buried his face into her hair – into her neck though there were no fangs to try and puncture her – and Annie rubbed her hands against his back.

         It was still hard, sometimes, to reconcile what Mitchell wanted and needed with what Mitchell _was_. But she’d realized that no matter what he did she still loved him. Loving him didn’t mean things were simple or easy. She could want simple and easy but she wasn’t good at it. Her track record showed it. What she was good at was what was true, and Mitchell had proven that about himself. Whatever else he was, he was true to her.

         He was still shaking, but the worst seemed to be over. His hands gripped her waist and his arms tightened more. When he was himself he tried never to seem interested in more than a sweet peck or a lingering press of lips, but now he kissed across her cheek and along her jaw. His kisses felt different when he was going against his own argument. They felt stronger, as though she was more solid receiving them. It was one of those moments, and she closed her eyes and felt his kisses.

         When his lips found their way down her neck, Mitchell jerked his face away. He let go of her, backing out of her embrace and turning away from her. His hand came up to cover his mouth again, and he closed his eyes. “I can’t,” he sobbed.

         Later, when he had truly come down, she would try to get him to talk, but now wasn’t the time.

         “You need a bath,” Annie said. “Come on.”

         She started to move ahead to the bathroom, and his eyes snapped open and to her. They were wild and he was shaking. Fear was in him. Normally it wasn’t so strong on him, but as he trapped her with his eyes it shouted louder at her than even that deep underlying affection.

         “Don’t,” Mitchell managed to get out, eyes darting to the door he’d come in through.

         Annie looked at the door. What, she wondered. If she’d just rent-a-ghost-ed, would he have gone back outside? Would he have done something terrible?

         “Upstairs,” Annie said with a frown. She took a step past him, putting herself between him and the door. He only had two options, upstairs or through her if he wanted to get out.

         Mitchell stared for a long while. Annie couldn’t tell if he was looking at her or if he was staring at nothing. After a minute or two, he started up the stairs. Annie followed behind him.

         Hours later, after his bath, after he was calmed down and he could touch her again, they lay side by side in his bed. His fingers were threaded through hers and he had his forehead against hers. He had her hands trapped between them against his chest, and he was finally breathing evenly.

         “What happened?” she asked softly.

         “I don’t want to talk about it.”

         “You know what happens when you don’t tell me things.”

         “What happens?”

         “You get all weird on me.”

         He managed out a chuckle, but it was hoarse and weak.

         “So come on, out with it.”

         “Can’t we just stay like this?” he asked sweetly. He squeezed her hands, rubbing his thumbs against them. She was used to this. His words felt like honey. That was what charm tasted like when he was using it.

         “We can, but you’re going to tell me what happened.”

         He sighed a heavy sigh. His hands released hers and he wrapped his arms around her, crushing her against him. He turned them over so he was on his back, and she settled on top of him. He kissed her cheek softly.

         “This doesn’t get you out of talking,” Annie said, pushing up enough so she could meet his eyes in what she hoped was a stern look.

         “I _know_ , Annie,” Mitchell said, letting his head fall back against the pillow.

         Annie bit her lip as he shifted beneath her, half-hard and still shaking just a little. Mitchell pulled her down against him, running a hand through his hair. Annie curled her arms around him and rested her cheek on his neck. Sometimes it was easier for him to talk if she wasn’t looking him straight in the eye.

         He took a deep breath, and stroked her back.

         “Mitchell-”

         “I just… had to see you. I had to lay my eyes on you again,” he said, wrapping his arms around her.

         “But what _happened_?”

         He sighed again. “Car wreck,” he replied. His arms tightened on her, and the slight shiver that he seemed to be doing got stronger. “There was so much…”

         “Blood,” Annie finished for him.

         “Yeah,” Mitchell replied, weakly. His erection stirred between them, and he shifted a bit.

         “And blood makes you…” Annie shifted against him, just a little, wondering if-

         “Yeah,” he groaned out.

         She stilled herself, and he sighed.

*

         Well, not sometimes. Sometimes was that once. She never made him call for her after that. After that, she knew. So whenever she felt him in distress, she was there. He didn’t have to call because she was listening to more than his voice. And he’d never say aloud that he needed that. He’d never admit that he loved her as herself but also as his chains.

         The look in his eye was enough to tell her.

         _This_ was the arrangement.


End file.
